Questioning my plan

[jquinn83]

I'm building a database for my football trading card collection. I had built one over 10 years ago in Access that really worked well but when i tried to use it recently it was corrupted and wouldn't open. So I'm going to build another using Base. The main goal is to create a database that can be accessed through the internet by other people so they can see what I have in my collection that they might trade for. The old database I built was a main form with buttons that launched other forms for adding new cards, editing existing cards, running searches by Player name, Team, Etc., running reports. When I started to create the buttons on the main form I didn't see an easy way to open a form like I remember in Access. Now I'm wondering if I'm going about this the wrong way. Should I be creating a HTML front end for the database instead? Is that easy to do with Base? I have messed around with HTML but I'm not a programmer and programming is not easy or fun for me.

[Villeroy]

Base is not the right tool for you.

[jquinn83]

Maybe so but with that response this is definitely not the forum for me

[Villeroy]

That's right since you have to use some tool other than OpenOffice.

[MTP]

The default database engine that comes with Base is an old version of Hyper-SQL DataBase (HSQLDB) that is not internet-accessible. Base itself is not particularly user-friendly, but it is doable for persistant users, and generally worthwhile for small projects where paying for a professional program can't be justified. The old version of HSQLDB has some irritating missing features, but the upgrade is not terribly painful if you are patient and follow online guides.

The main obstacle for your project would be figuring out all the settings to change to enable HSQLDB to be internet-accessible. And Base is not compatible with the internet features of HSQLDB; you would have to build forms in a web language such as php to enable your users to access the database. That is a much bigger technical task. Unless you have a lot of programming skills already, the learning curve would be too high to be worthwhile for a small hobby project.

[Villeroy]

Building web pages with a HSQL server is possible but in this scenario OpenOffice is of no avail. Wrong HSQL version, wrong (embedded) setup, wrong tool set (no HTML forms), wrong by any means.